The result emerged from a survey conducted in 67 countries to verify the perception of public opinion on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. As many as six European countries rank among the ten most skeptical in the world, while the most hopeful are the countries of Southeast Asia
September 12, 2016 – The Sciences
The fight against infectious diseases has recorded enormous successes in recent decades thanks to vaccinations. A serious disease such as smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization - the first case in history - in 1980. Annual cases of diphtheria and poliomyelitis have drastically decreased worldwide in recent decades. The last case of polio in Italy dates back to 1982.
Great results have also been obtained with diseases such as measles, whooping cough and hepatitis B, the incidence of which has been greatly reduced, so as to create, especially in the West, a movement of opinion according to which the risk of disease and death is now so low enough not to justify the risks often magnified by uncontrolled rumors that have no scientific basis. The paradoxical effect is that avoidable diseases have returned to strike with unexpected virulence.
The case of measles is emblematic, a disease with a mortality limited to 0.1-0.2 percent of those affected, but which can reach ten percent in undernourished children. Before vaccines became available in the 1960s, globally this meant 7-8 million child deaths each year. Precisely thanks to the diffusion of vaccines, these mortality figures have decreased significantly over the decades: about 630,000 in 1990 and 158,000 in 2011. Yet in 2015 an epidemic occurred in the United States in a population with a reduced immunity just to following anti-vaccination campaigns. Result: a woman who died of the infection.
These phenomena have thus once again brought to the attention of health authorities around the world the need to maintain adequate vaccination coverage for avoidable diseases. To get it, however, it is necessary
the agreement of a significant part of the population. The current problem is that a part of the public opinion declares itself distrustful, if not openly opposed, of vaccines, for safety reasons.
According to one study published in “EbioMedicine”, the most skeptical nation, among those examined in the research, is paradoxically France, the homeland of Louis Pasteur, the microbiologist who perfected immunization techniques in the 19th century. Between September and December 2015, Heidi Larson, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and colleagues conducted a survey of nearly 66,000 people in 67 countries about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, as well as their compatibility with religious beliefs. personal.
The surprise is that old Europe places seven nations – France, Russia, Greece, Armenia, Ukraine, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina – in the ranking of the ten most skeptical. Beyond the Alps, the percentage of respondents who do not agree that vaccines are safe reaches 41 percent, in Bosnia and Herzegovina 36 percent, in Russia 28 percent and in Mongolia 27 percent, while the global average is 12 percent.
Italy is definitely on the side of the skeptics: about 20 percent disagree that vaccines are safe, 17.6 percent that they are effective, 14 percent that they are important. Finally, about 17 percent consider them contrary to their religious beliefs. The latter problem is particularly felt in a country with a Buddhist majority like Mongolia, with a percentage against that exceeds 46 percent.
The countries of Southeast Asia were the most confident in the safety of vaccines: in Bangladesh, for example, the percentage of skeptics is less than one percent. In Europe, on the other hand, Germany and the Scandinavian countries stand out, all with percentages of skepticism well below 8-10 percent in terms of safety and efficacy, and 5 percent in terms of importance.
The disaggregated data concerning the answers to the individual questions demonstrate how varied public opinion is. The French, despite their concerns about the safety of vaccines, seem convinced in most cases of their health importance. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, 27.3 percent of the sample also expressed a negative opinion on their effectiveness. Furthermore, in Russia, 17 percent of respondents do not believe that vaccines are important for children.
But what are the reasons for such a vast front of vaccine skeptics? In addition to the non-existent connection between vaccines and autism, which has also taken hold in our country despite being unfounded from a scientific point of view, the authors report other examples of beliefs that have spread locally in public opinion. France, for example, has shown great concern about the hypothesis of a correlation between the hepatitis B vaccine and the onset of multiple sclerosis, and about possible side effects, such as asthenia, in women vaccinated against the human papilloma virus.
The results of the study are an important step forward in understanding public opinion's resistance to vaccines, which is in turn essential for being able to plan vaccination campaigns at a national level.
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European region most skeptical in the world on vaccine safety
